Rules Are Rules

“Because I said so,” is the last refuge of the fatigued parent, It is also the first option of the incipient fascist.

This observation derives from a pair of unintentionally related items in the New York Times.

The first was an article in The Athletic that reported on the disqualification of a high school track team. The young men’s 400 meter relay squad was in the final few meters of the last relay leg when the runner raised an open hand, the five digits representing his team’s fifth consecutive state title. Immediately, an eager official brandished a yellow flag, disqualifying the relay for excessive “celebration.” The dignity with which the coach and runner accepted this indignity dwarfed the petty bureaucracy demonstrated by the official.

Rules are rules.

As often the case, comments from readers were illuminating. Some readers shared my view, acquired through my rule-testing youth, that the disqualification was excessive, picayune, and mean-spirited. More folks cluck-clucked that it was too bad, of course, but the kid and coach knew the rules and suffered the just penalty.

The woman official who raised the yellow flag said she had warned the same runner for a similar infraction earlier in the meet. The runner and his coach disagreed. They appealed and lost. The head official also cluck-clucked, but said she must support the official who made the call. Rules are rules.

Unsportsmanlike conduct indeed, but by the officials, not the kid. His gesture was sweet and restrained. Their conduct was typical of small-minded people who often inhabit positrons where they can exert control.

We encounter them frequently, like the airport enforcer on a recent pick-up who insisted that I move my car and repeatedly drive a circular route through the orange-coned chaos that is Denver International Airport. I was waiting beyond the pick-up zone at a lonely curb far from any possible obstruction. But rules are rules, so I drove the loop and lifted my hand like the relay runner, but with only a single digit.

The second, far more tragic, report revealed the astonishingly cruel actions of our government, which has separated more than 140,000 children from their immigrant parents. These actions dwarf the border separations of the first Trump administration, but have garnered scant notice. Perhaps we’ve become numb from serial traumatization.

The circumstances leading to the separations vary widely, but the main takeaway, as with other chapters in this miserable book, is that cruelty is the point.

Here too, readers’ comments were revealing and demonstrative of the many chasms of emotion and reason that divide our body politic. It is important to note that these were not comments of subscribers to Breitbart News, where one might expect a chorus of “fuck ‘ems.”

These supposedly more erudite New York Times readers placed the blame primarily on parents who exposed their “anchor babies” to the consequences of bad decisions. We are a nation of laws, they said and cluck-clucked away just like those who supported the bitter little women who ripped a championship from overly-cheerful teenagers. Rules are rules.

Did I note that the runner is Black and that all those “bad” parents are brown and Black? I’m sure even a few of my erudite readers will roll their eyes and accuse me of playing the “race card.” Guilty as charged, I suppose, but it is hard to avoid playing a race card when the entire American deck is stacked with race cards.

I began with, “It is also the first option of the incipient fascist.” That language is not hyperbolic. The parallels with Nazi Germany are striking, while not identical. There too, rules were rules and led apparently normal humans to perform abnormally inhumane actions.

(Of course I recognize that disqualifying a high school runner is several furlongs short of fascism. But the mindset is traveling in the same direction.)

These actions and the inaction of others were the result of declaring the exclusive exceptionalism of white men and the constant relegation of Jews, Slavs, gay folks, those with disabilities and Jehovah’s Witnesses into a violently disfavored “other.”

When “other” slides to “subhuman,” genocide becomes conscionable, even necessary.

Our current administration is steeped in white nationalist supremacy. The wholesale and indiscriminate imprisonment of Black and brown people is unconscionable, yet merits only brief scrutiny below the fold in our daily attentions. They are our “other.”

A nation that can murder Iranian schoolchildren, support genocide in Gaza and stand by while 140,000 children are torn from parents is not as far from 1930s Germany as we like to think.